This invention relates generally to faucet fountains adapted for attachment to faucets for drinking and having fanciful objects or characters with human-like or animal-like features for entertaining children. More particularly the invention relates to an improved construction of such faucet fountains having provision for making sounds or voices that are compatible with the fanciful object or character on the faucet fountain.
Faucet fountains have been proposed for attachment to faucets or aerators connected to the faucets, which permit normal usage of the faucet, and which also permit alternate use by manual manipulation of a closure member to obtain a flow of drinking water from a spout. Such a fountain has been proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,934,597 issued Jun. 19, 1990 to William C. Crutcher, said patent being incorporated herein by reference. This fountain comprised a tubular body with a front wall portion and a rear wall portion, the tubular body having an inlet end adapted to frictionally fit over a faucet and having an outlet end, a closure member attached to the rear wall portion adjacent the outlet end and of sufficient size to cover the outlet end, and a fountain conduit extending upwardly and outwardly from a hole defined in the front wall portion near the outlet end of the tubular body to a terminating spout end, the closure member being arranged to be moved to cover the outlet end to direct water from the faucet through the spout end. The subject patent preferably employed an integral plastic body and closure member with a living hinge. The type of faucet fountain mold described above, preferably a high volume injection mold, is very expensive. If it is desired to embellish the exterior of the faucet fountain with fanciful character features, a new mold would be required each time a new character is needed.
On the other hand, there are inexpensive molding techniques available for molding sculptures of character faces, enabling complex exterior surfaces on hollow shapes. One technique uses rotational casting of plastic using inexpensive molds, introducing the plastic into the mold interior and rotating it while the plastic cures. The exterior surface of the hollow plastic casting may duplicate a fanciful character figure, face or scene, which is enhanced by painting features onto the exterior surface. Such techniques and plastics are not suitable for manufacturing a faucet fountain, but very adaptable to changing from one fanciful object or character face to another. A faucet fountain has been proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,337,956, issued Aug. 16, 1994 to William C. Crutcher that combines a jacket depicting a character or fanciful object placed over a faucet fountain core to create a combination toy and faucet fountain, said patent being incorporated herein by reference.
While the aforesaid combination creates an economical way to create a large variety of characters or fanciful objects, there are many times that sounds are closely associated with characters, or when it would be amusing to create a voice or sound when the faucet fountain is actuated. For example, animals are associated from childhood with well-known sounds, e.g. mooing cows, grunting pigs, meowing cats and barking dogs. Also, popular animated characters sometimes are associated with verbal phrases such as the “Cowabunga” of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or “What's up, Doc” of Bugs Bunny. It would add to the utility of a faucet fountain having such a character to sound out the favorite phrase of that character when the fountain is activated. Also traditional holiday characters, such as a Halloween witch on a faucet fountain would have added utility if augmented with a witches cackle when the fountain is activated.
A faucet toy, which is not a fountain, has been produced by the Taiwan company Lucky Star, and described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,482,078 issued Jan. 9, 1996 to Yeh. In this toy, an animal sound mechanism is activated by a stream of water from the faucet as it passes through an animal head affixed to the faucet. However, this toy suffers from the fact that the sound is always activated whenever the faucet is turned on, because it is activated by the main water stream.
It would be desirable to have a faucet fountain with a sound producing mechanism that is only activated when using the faucet fountain, but which is not activated when the faucet is turned on for normal use. It would also be desirable to have a character faucet fountain that emits a sound associated with a particular character when the fountain is used.
Accordingly one object of the present invention is to provide a faucet fountain embellished with a fanciful object, such as a fanciful character face, which emits a sound associated with the character.
Another object of the invention is to provide an improvement in a toy faucet fountain which will appeal to children.
Still another object of the invention is to provide a talking faucet fountain which is economical to produce, and easy to convert to a number of different characters, using the same basic core and sound module configuration.
Another object of the invention is to provide a faucet fountain with a sound producing mechanism that is only activated when using the faucet fountain, but which is not activated when the faucet is turned on for normal use.